Dear Yogis,
ZOOM
SATURDAY: 12.30 RESTORATIVE Yoga with weights and props 2pm MAKE YOUR OWN TAROT with a Watercolour introduction.
SUNDAY: 10AM YOGA TEACHER TRAINING (The Bhagavadgita) . Anyone interested welcome $20 per class with a free repeat next Sunday morning. Go to www.yogabeautiful.com.au – look on the home page for details.
SATURDAY AGAIN.
Mushroom season is still with us…(especially in my area). I have to remind you that whilst we are isolated with covid and it is lovely to walk in the forest and wonderful to forage for fungi MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Always refer to a book, or better still, a fungi expert – before you put your prize in the stew. I love making remedies as you know and I keep learning and making. My olive leaf extract is “legendary” (it saved me often enough too), and soon Red Reishi, Chaga and Turkey Tail mushroom tinctures will be on our shelves. I have been encouraging you to use natural where you can, and include hemp in all your recipes. We are on the change of seasons and usually that is when our immune systems need a helping hand, especially in a covid world..
SURVIVAL
It is a big word, and we need to know what it means to all of us. What is the biggest single organism on the planet. Answer -Fungi. If you guessed a redwood tree or a blue whale, you would be wrong. The largest organism is a fungus.
Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west in the USA that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.
Armillaria has the unique ability to extend rhizomorphs, flat shoestringlike structures, that bridge gaps between food sources and expand the fungus’s sweeping perimeter ever more.
A combination of good genes and a stable environment has allowed this particularly ginormous fungus to continue its creeping existence over the past millennia. “These are very strange organisms to our anthropocentric way of thinking,” says biochemist Myron Smith of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. An Armillaria individual consists of a network of hyphae, he explains. “Collectively, this network is called the mycelium and is of an indefinite shape and size.” (The photo to the left and below is of rampant fungi near my home, not a honey mushroom, although I believe, in the same family – Armillaria)
All fungi in the Armillaria genus are known as honey mushrooms, for the yellow-capped and sweet fruiting bodies they produce. Some varieties share this penchant for monstrosity but are more benign in nature. In fact the very first massive fungus discovered in 1992—a 37-acre (15-hectare) Armillaria bulbosa, which was later renamed Armillaria gallica—is annually celebrated at a “fungus fest” in the nearby town of Crystal Falls, Mich.
WHY SHOULD I KNOW?
Because scientists are discovering that this mycelium is a fantastic food source for bees. Bees use it historically and in the examples above are assisted by bears which tear at trees (like cats on a scratching pole), allowing the mycelium to be visible, and giving bees access. Bees also are assisted when the mycelium in the ground and in fallen logs is made accessible, by animals or natural disturbances.
Knowledgable growers are now starting to grow different types of mycelium on rice and on wood chips to assist bee nutrition, and have found they can reverse hive collapse by feeding a product they call MYCOHONEY which is a sweet syrup made from the sugars in mycelium. Is this important – not only important, critical for the the ongoing survival of bee colonies.
This mycelium is also finding its way into mushroom products for humans. It is early days, but with the fungi measuring the size of 1,655 football fields, this potential nutritional source can help a lot of people. Maybe this is the MANNA from heaven described in the bible? It was sweet, and occurred all along the route the Israelites took in their escape from Egypt. I think only Mycelium could do this.
Whilst this field of mushrooms above looks like individual fungi, lift the pine needles and you will find the white thread like mycelium connecting each fruiting body. It is one organism.
THERE IS SO MUCH FOR US TO ATTEND TO, to understand, in order for our planet to survive. Our loss of connection to the earth and the Divine has left us without clarity, and without purpose. We need to discover that the holy lives all around us (and within us). Holy books are not just books of rules, but a pathway to consciousness. To manifest our creative gifts in this spiritually unimaginative world, we must create from the centre of our beings. Our souls must encircle each other, and the planet, so that we may join with one another to create a workable civilisation.
JOIN WITH ME IN THIS.
NAMASTE. JAHNE
Yesterday was my day off and I did something I rarely do – I watched a movie -“MY OCTOPUS TEACHER”. 
REGISTRATION:
We live in a very worried, stressed culture and Covid is making this worse. Prior to the pandemic 70% to 90% of visits to primary care physicians are attributable to stress. When I first came to the Macedon Ranges there were few doctors, one or two for each of the little clusters of communities. Not only could you easily get an appointment, the doctors and their small staffs had time for yoga. Now there are 20 and more doctors where there used to be one or two (multiplied by medical offices springing up all over the Shire, plus specialists etc.). In spite of the huge increase in doctors and support staff, you can’t get an appointment, hardly anyone values yoga, and fewer come to class.